Ottomar
Anschütz and his Electrical Wonder

By
Deac Rossell

The
full role of Ottomar Anschütz in the story of the first moving pictures
is not well known. In 1892, two years before Edison's peepshow Kinetoscope
was first shown to the public, Anschütz' moving photographs were being
shown in arcade machines - the 'Electrical Wonder' - in Europe and America.
His improved cardboard Zoetrope, for photographic series pictures, had
been developed some years previously. By 1894 his motion sequences of
animals and human figures, very brief but of fine quality, were being
projected onto large screens in Germany by means of his 'Projecting
Electrotachyscope'; the world's first projected photographic (unposed)
motion picture sequences.

Deac
Rossell is a researcher specialising in the study of pre-cinema and
the early years of film. He is a contributor to Who's Who of Victorian
Cinema (BFI, 1996) and author of '...The New Thing with the Long Name
and the Old Thing with the Name That Isn't Much Shorter...' Film History
(Summer 1995), a major chronology of the cinema to the end of 1896.